This book provides a research-based overview of the use of psychotropic medications in combination with psychosocial interventions to improve learning, social interactions, and behavioral functioning of children within the school setting. It details implementation strategies for delivering multimodal treatments to school-aged children with psychiatric diagnoses while coordinating services across educational and health service sectors. In addition, it includes case studies on ADHD, conduct disorder, depression, social anxiety, autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder, and psychosis, with overviews of treatment plans, targeted goals and behaviors, classroom-based medication evaluation plans, and treatment responses communicated back to the child’s family and physician. The book concludes with an overview of integrated behavioral health and the benefits of care coordination to school-aged children experiencing social, emotional, and behavioral challenges. Topics featured in this text include: Legal, ethical, and professional issues related to the use of psychotropic medications in school-aged populations. Effective medications for treating mood dysregulation disorders in school-aged youth. Medications for internalizing and externalizing disorders. Common side effects of psychotropic medication in school-aged populations. The need to be culturally sensitive when considering treatment plans for school-aged youth. School Psychopharmacology is an essential resource for researchers, graduate students, and other professionals in child and school psychology, social work, psychiatry, psychopharmacology, special and general education, public health, and counseling.

Psychotropic medications have been dramatically successful over the since the 1950s, but severe problems remain. The World Health Organization (WHO) has a legal responsibility to review these drugs, estimate their benefit/risk ratio, help ensure their proper prescription and recommend which ones require international controls. This book utilizes the experience of the WHO to provide information about how such drugs should be evaluated, such as the planning, executing, monitoring, analyzing, interpreting and reporting involved with correctly making such evaluations. Subjects range from the evaluation of drugs from primary studies in healthy volunteers to the longitudinal study of drugs in routine use. Further chapters examine special issues in the evaluations of drug effects upon children and the elderly. There is also a section on study design and a final brief chapter on some transcultural issues.

This practical reference examines the advantages and disadvantages of polypharmacy in psychiatry, and provides up-to-date clinical guidelines on the appropriate use of combinations of pharmacological therapy in major psychiatric disorders-including multidisciplinary approaches to treatment, such as social work and psychopharmacology, and an examina

"This book has been divided into three main sections. Part I deals with global issues that bear on the assessment and formulation of possible adverse effects and with pertinent concepts related to basic pharmacology, physiology, and medical monitoring. The chapters in Part II present information organized by individual organ systems or specific medical circumstances rather than by drugs or drug classes. This approach seems to provide a logical and comprehensible format that allow readers to search out information as referenced by a particular side effect (and its varied potential causes) and to locate a discussion of practical management strategies. Part III focuses on summary recommendations covering all the material presented in the book and is followed by helpful appendixes on self-assessment questions and resources for practitioners. The book is meant to serve as a ready reference that simultaneously provides scientific and scholarly discussion of available treatment options and presents their scientific rationales."--page xx.